The 3/4 Jeff Cup race was awesome.  The pace was high, Evo showed a big presence, and showed that they could execute a designed plan.  With 10 riders we had a lot of flexibility with what we could do, but focused the race on getting at least 2 Evo riders into a breakaway.  With Stewart Kidston and Justin Woulfe showing themselves to have the strongest legs in the preseason, we focused our plan on getting them away from the main pack early in the race.

After turn 1, 1/4 of the way up the hill, Vic S. and Dave G. attacked hard in an effort to tire out those fresh legs of all the chasers.  We were shortly caught (as we knew we would), and Dave B. and Mike B. immediately attacked again, keeping the pace high.  They managed to stay away even longer, showing that the chasers were already slowing down the chasing.  They too were shortly caught (also as expected).  A few miles later was the big hill after turn 1 again, and Stewart and Justin attacked. (That's 3 hard Evo attacks in the first 13 miles of the race.)  This time, they chasers didn't have quite as much chase left in them, and Stewart and Justin quickly got out of site.  During all 3 of our attacks, the rest of the team worked hard to slow things down in the front, and in the middle of the pack, opening gaps within the main peloton, forcing everybody to work, regardless of location in the field.

The motorcycle continued to inform Justin and Stewart that their gap was steadily increasing.  Unfortunately, it wasn't long before lady luck disappeared and Justin had a mechanical and "lost" most of his rear gears.  Without any big gears to push, he was unable to continue working with Stewart and the break was eventually reeled back in after only 1 lap (10 miles).
Again turn 1 came with the hill, and a group of riders on the front, including several Evo members, pushed the pace hard to string out the pack and potentially get away.  We quickly learned that while the hill made for a great spot to open up large gaps in the field, the long straight downhill sections after the hill gave the peloton too much of an advantage.  Somewhere on lap 4, 2 non-Evo riders got away from the peloton.  At the beginning of lap 5, Evo made a huge push to catch the 2 riders in the breakaway, and did a great job of  stringing out the main peloton as well as enabling them to overtake 1of the 2 riders with less than 2km to go (the other breakaway rider was able to barely hang on for a solo first place finish).  The fast pace of the last lap had tired out the pack, and the final sprint was less than spectacular.  With 100M to go, I found myself sitting about 12th position on the outside, and still nobody wanted to make the first move, but a few seconds later, one person stood up, and the whole front surged.
I ended up finishing 9th overall, 7th in the Cat 3 group.   2 Cat 4's had beaten me in the sprint... those sand baggers.     The rest of the results have not been posted as of this writing.
Even though we didn't get first and second, we showed that we were well organized and very strong as a team.  Lady luck just wasn't on our side, but that is sometimes how things go.  Justin will be in school for most of the rest of the early season, but hopefully summer will get here soon and we'll see more of him during his vacation from VMI.
We'll be working on tactics for the 30+ race at Chesapeake shortly.    Stay tuned for more exciting coverage!

later,

dave

p.s. I know that there were some other Evo attacks that I did not write about.  Sorry if I left anything out.  Special thanks to the Cat 4 squad.  If it hadn't been for them, none of our attacks would have been as successful.